When is enough words enough?

That’s been a classic question from students since teachers first gave out written assignments.

Young writers always ask how long do you want this essay to be? Teachers, not to disappoint, usually give them a length — one page, two pages, 1000 words, etc.
However, as you grow older, the answer sometimes changes, particular for young writers who go into journalism.

By college, the stock answer to how long should an essay be is usually “as long as you need to cover the topic.”

Particularly in journalism, brevity is normally preferred. That’s because newspapers have limited space and so the more news they can put in a paper, the better job they do at informing their readers. And to put more news in an edition, stories need to be written as concisely as possible.

In fact, this desire to put as much news in a story with as few words as possible spawned the inverted pyramid style of writing, a basic for newspaper writers. Briefly, this style requires reporters to put the most important information about a topic or an issue at the beginning of a story so that if the piece has to be cut to fit a limited amount of space, it can be cut from the bottom and thus still tell the reader what happened or give him information.

Obviously, there’s much more to be taught about this style of writing, which why journalists normally go to school for four years.

Sooner or later most journalists realize that, under this type of writing style, much can be said in a few words or sentences.

With this as a background, I’m going to respond, generally, to a request from one of my frequent guest opinion writers. She asked if sometimes I could bend the 600 word rule and allow her 700 or 800 words. She seemed to feel 600 words wasn’t enough to make her point.

While sometimes more detail is preferred on a topic, generally, we’ve found that less definitely is more. Sometimes people, particularly letter writers, object to our 250 word limit for them. They say they can’t express what they want to in so few words.
However, experience has taught me that for purposes of trying to make a point, an opinion can easily be expressed in 250 words and more than enough information can supplied to back up a view in a 600-word guest opinion.

To be fair to all of those people who submit letters and guest opinions, I have to take a relatively strong stand on the 250 word and 550-600 word limits, respectively.

Fortunately, the guest writer understood our situation, as do most people who submit pieces to the Opinion Page.